As a long-time Shopify seller, I thought I had my SEO basics covered. I optimize my product titles, write unique descriptions, and work hard on my collections. So, imagine my shock when I recently discovered that all four of my Shopify stores were missing the single most important on-page SEO element on their homepages: the H1 tag.
I spent two frustrating hours digging through the Shopify Community forums, trying various "quick fixes" that never quite worked. That's why I'm writing this guide. After a lot of trial and error, I developed a foolproof, two-step method that solved the problem cleanly on all my stores, which use popular free themes like Ride, Taste, and Shapes.
This guide will walk you through my exact process. We'll uncover why this problem exists, why you shouldn't just copy what other sites are doing, and finally, implement a perfect, professional-grade solution.
A quick note: This guide focuses specifically on the homepage. Most Shopify themes correctly assign H1 tags to your product titles, blog post titles, and collection titles. The homepage is the one that's almost always forgotten.
The first thing I learned is that on most Shopify themes, the problem isn't that you have no H1 tag. The problem is that your H1 tag is being wasted on your store's logo.
This is bad for SEO. Your homepage H1 should be a descriptive sentence with your main keywords, telling Google what your entire store is about. Your logo can't do that. Here's how you can check your own site in under a minute.
The One-Minute Diagnosis:
<h1> tags?
H1 Tag Diagnosis in Developer Tools
If you see your logo wrapped in an <h1>, you have the same problem I did. Our mission is to first "free" this H1 tag from the logo, then put it to proper use.
Of course, you can also install a browser extension to check whether your H1 tag is present and functioning properly. Like this:
SEO Extension Check
During my research, I found other websites that seemed to have this figured out. But when I inspected their code, I realized they were making the exact same mistake: their H1 was still on their logo! Ps: This is actually a well-known DTC brand. I discovered them through official recommendations from Google and Shopify plus, and I've been studying their marketing ever since. You can see their logo is used as the H1 tag, which is lazy and totally wrong.
Brand Logo H1 Example
Using the logo as the H1 provides very little informational value to search engines and AI crawlers like Google, ChatGPT, or Perplexity. The H1 acts as your website's tagline—it should be a clear, concise sentence that immediately tells crawlers what your site is about. Unless you're Nike, Coca-Cola, or Disney—brands that need no introduction—this is a missed opportunity.
H1 Tag Best Practices
As a result, many of their product and collection pages ended up reusing the homepage H1, which can seriously mislead Google and AI crawlers like ChatGPT. This directly affects how the quality of the site is evaluated. This has a significant negative impact on their website's AI visibility. See following screenshot: they don't have H1 tag on a very important collection page!
Missing H1 Collection Page
This is a critically important lesson: don't just copy another site's code without understanding the SEO principle behind it. Using the H1 tag for your logo is an outdated practice because:
We need a better, more professional solution.
Our goal is simple:
<h1> from the logo.<h1> to the homepage that is invisible to users but perfectly visible to Google, ChatGPT and other AI crawlers.The Philosophy: We will use a special CSS class to visually hide our new H1 tag. It's important not to use display: none;, as Google may ignore that. Instead, we use a modern, accessibility-friendly technique that is perfectly safe for SEO.
Step 1: The Prerequisite - Fixing header.liquid
First, we need to tell the theme to stop using <h1> for the logo.
<h1. You are looking for the code that wraps your logo.<h1> tag to <div> and the closing </h1> tag to </div>. You may need to do this in one or two places within the file.BEFORE
Header Before Fix
AFTER: h1 to div
Header After Fix
A special note: On my Taste, Ride, and Shapes themes, this <h1> tag was often inside an {% if template.name == 'index' %} statement. This is fine. The fix is the same: change the h1 to div wherever you find it wrapping the logo.
Step 2: The Implementation - Modifying theme.liquid
This is where we add our new, powerful H1. This step involves editing the most important file in your theme, so please be careful.
<body> tag near the top of the file. It might look like <body class="gradient"> or something similar.<body> tag.
Theme Liquid Implementation
The Code to Paste:
{%- if template.name == 'index' or template == 'index' -%}
<style>
.visually-hidden {
position: absolute;
width: 1px;
height: 1px;
margin: -1px;
padding: 0;
overflow: hidden;
clip: rect(0, 0, 0, 0);
border: 0;
white-space: nowrap;
}
</style>
<h1 class="visually-hidden">Your Awesome Homepage Title - Main Keywords Here</h1>
{%- endif -%}
From the initial shock of discovery to a final, perfect solution, this journey taught me a valuable lesson. Optimizing your store is about understanding the principles, not just applying quick fixes.
Here is your final checklist:
<h1>.<div>, not a heading tag. Fix this in header.liquid.I hope this detailed guide saves you the two hours of frustration it cost me. Getting your homepage H1 tag right is a huge step forward in your SEO journey.
Good luck, and feel free to share your success in the comments!